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Opinion: Skype Is Gone—The Online Memorial to a Beloved Technology
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
This month, Skype stopped offering its service to millions of users around the world. As an alternative, Microsoft is pushing everyone toward Teams. But hundreds of thousands are grieving the loss and sharing memories that reflect on the evolution of this once-groundbreaking technology.
Skype is officially dead . Millions of users around the world are mourning the digital loss, sharing fascinating anecdotes and grieving the end of an era, one in which the platform supported human communication for 22 years.
Was it perfect? No. But it was good. It had its own emo-era emojis, a signature call sound, and it pioneered new ways of connecting long before others dared to try.
in honour of skŷpē dying, a moment of silence for this emoji pic.twitter.com/u6fe1hQGLb — elle (@skelllie) May 8, 2025
Over time, however, the rise of newer technologies like Zoom and WhatsApp offered faster and reliable alternatives, and Skype started to lag behind. Many blame Microsoft for neglecting the platform, but the tech world is also ruthless, especially in today’s generative AI era.
In May 2025, Skype ascends to the digital afterlife, joining other beloved technologies that once shaped our lives—like MSN Messenger, and perhaps even Google Plus. But what made this tool so impactful for people across the globe? What kinds of experiences changed lives? And how fragile are the digital platforms we rely on today?
From a Small Business in Luxembourg to a Global Phenomenon
Skype was born in Luxembourg, August 29, 2003—a Virgo! Its company was founded by Swedish Niklas Zennström and Danish Janus Friis. Its developing team was composed of multinational talent, and together they built the user-friendly software, based on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), that allowed internet voice calls among users for free.
Very quickly, in just 6 weeks of beta testing, 1.5 million people had downloaded the software, and social media didn’t even exist. Skype not only offered free online voice calls among users, but also calls to traditional landlines for a fraction of the cost.
In 2005, eBay bought the company, keeping its founders’ ownership, and later introduced new features, video calls, and extended its popularity among international students, families, and lovers—reaching 100 million users a year later.
Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, when it had reached over 170 million active users. Little by Little, the tech giant integrated its ecosystems, replacing Windows Live Messenger.
Skype kept flourishing, handling 40% of the international telephone market in its traffic , and reached 300 million daily users in 2020 . As a current reference, Threads recently reached 257 million monthly users and Snap Map 400 million .
The decline
Microsoft tried to incorporate new features—and new emojis—but had a hard time keeping up with competitors during the pandemic.
Despite its 300 million user record in 2020, Zoom and WhatsApp developed strategies to seduce more users, and many migrated to other communication platforms. By 2023, Skype’s user base had drastically declined to 36 million active users.
The independent comedy video platform Dropout TV, shared a sketch in 2021 called “ A Message From the Skype CEO ,” featuring comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan as a fictional CEO of Skype that went viral—reaching over 5 million views—as it represented very well what we could all image a hypothetical Skype’s CEO could have felt at the moment.
However, Microsoft Teams—where Microsoft is currently redirecting Skype users—peaked at 320 million users during the same time, taking advantage of the pandemic’s needs for remote work software. Was it Microsoft’s plan all along? Maybe not, but many users are hurt and blame Microsoft for Skype’s death.
Microsoft should never have bought Skype. It crippled the product and basically killed it like only Microsoft knows how to kill a product. — Aric (@aricfedida) May 6, 2025
A Virtual Funeral Full of Anecdotes, Memories and Tears
After Microsoft announced the end of Skype, millions of users across the world shared anecdotes and emotional stories of how the platform connected them to other users and accompanied people for years. The online obituaries have been flooding social media platforms.
“I met my wife online and we used Skype to talk every day while we dated for years,” wrote a user on Reddit . “I will never forget skype calls to my grandparents as they lived in another country and i could rarely visit them,” added another.
the shutdown of Skype definitely brings strange feelings. the last call i had on Skype was with a person who is no longer alive. he was a mentor to me and dearly important to me. perhaps, if I had called him on Skype one more time, he will still be here today. — beck (@beck3k_) May 5, 2025
While many considered Skype a wonderful ally to support long-distance relationships, this technology also helped others discover their partner’s infidelities and even broke up relationships.
RIP to Skype, which I will always remember as the tool I used to break up with a man on Valentine’s Day because he was simply too busy to talk to me any of the other days that week — Sarah Smith 🦙 (@sarahesmith23) May 6, 2025
Although emotions are running high on social media over Skype’s departure, many also acknowledge that it’s part of the nature of technological progress for some platforms to die.
“I think Skype just shared the same fate as MSN Messenger, MySpace and ICQ in a changing web,” wrote a Redditor . “Skype was eventually replaced by better alternatives, Discord in my case, and Teams on a professional level.”
Technologies’ Fragility in an Uncertain Time
Although Skype may have simply followed its natural course—as with any death—it’s inevitable to look for someone to blame, to recall how useful this technology was at different stages of our lives, and ultimately, to accept that other software managed to meet users’ needs—perhaps with better marketing, too—and adapt to the rapid changes of the market.
However, it’s also true that the power of much larger companies can devour and overshadow other technologies. These transitions—whether through the acquisition of startups or the death of platforms—remind us that, as users, we don’t actually have much control over our data or the actions of major tech corporations.
Those who resist using Microsoft Teams the way they once used Skype still have a chance to download their data, revisit old chats and conversations that may have had a significant impact on their lives, and migrate to other platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Zoom—to set up a new home for their memories.
Image by Xavi Cabrera, from Unsplash
LegoGPT: AI Turns Text Prompts Into Lego Creations
- Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have introduced LegoGPT, a new AI system that builds real-world Lego creations from written descriptions.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- It ensures physical stability using physics-aware rollback.
- Trained on 47,000 stable Lego structures and GPT-4o captions.
- Uses only 8 brick types within a 20×20×20 space.
It’s the first AI of its kind that not only follows a text prompt—like “a streamlined, elongated vessel”—but also ensures the resulting structure is physically stable and can be built, brick by brick.
“To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions,” the team explained in their research paper .
LegoGPT was trained using over 47,000 stable Lego models paired with detailed captions generated by GPT-4o. These were built from 3D shapes, turned into Lego structures, then tested for real-world stability using physics simulations.
Each structure was also described from 24 angles so the AI could learn what various designs should look like in words.
The team used a special technique called “physics-aware rollback,” where unstable parts of a design are removed and rebuilt until the whole structure holds up. This improved build success rates from 24% to 98.8%.
The AI model, based on Meta’s LLaMA-3.2-Instruct, predicts which Lego brick to place next—similar to how ChatGPT predicts the next word. Every suggested brick is checked for placement, size, and potential collisions before being added to the model.
LegoGPT’s creations can be built by both humans and robots. “Our experiments show that LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing Lego designs that align closely with the input text prompts,” the researchers wrote.
For now, LegoGPT uses just eight basic brick types and works within a 20×20×20 space, but the team hopes to expand it.
Their full dataset, code, and model are free to access , so others can keep building on this research. Alternatively, you can just play around with their demo .
